Blog

Today’s Trajectory in Digital

Puma “Social” champions a million views, but the short film/ad “focuses on the benefits of living life by going out and hanging out with friends rather than watching reality TV on the couch” and tracked well over social media shares (via Mediapost)

Aside from whether a movie is shot on film or not, what’s pushing projection away from film? “Today, the driving force isn’t so much a single movie as it is the studios’ bottom line — they no longer want to pay to physically print and ship movies. It costs about $1,500 to print one copy of a movie on 35 mm film and ship it to theaters in its heavy metal canister. Multiply that by 4,000 copies — one for each movie on each screen in each multiplex around the country — and the numbers start to get ugly. By comparison, putting out a digital copy costs a mere $150.” LA Weekly (via Spencer Goodall)

Online viewership of content is doubling, while disc viewership is slowly decreasing, even though online doesn’t yet deliver the same content. “According to the study [in IHS Screen Digest], streaming viewing of movies will overtake disc viewing this year. IHS Screen Digest projects that there will be 3.4 billion online viewings of movies this year (and that’s just the paid, legal ones), more than double the 1.4 billion streams and downloads tracked in 2011. By contrast, disc views will number 2.4 billion, down a bit from 2.6 billion views last year.” (via Moviefone)

Trailer viewership online is way up. “‘We teased the teaser [for Ridley Scott’s “Promethius”],’ said Fox Chief Marketing Officer Oren Aviv. ‘And it was viewed 29.7 million times.’ … Yahoo, AOL and Apple’s iTunes battle to be the “exclusive” first home for a trailer online, often trading high-profile placement on a home page in exchange for the favor. In other cases, trailers are shared first with devoted fans via a Twitter feed or a Facebook game. Sometimes studios pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to companies that promise to help turn videos viral.” (via Los Angeles Times)

Web series are still trendy. “53% [of a 2012 Digitas study] said that if their favorite celebrity announced that they were starring in or launching an online video or web series, they would check it out. That last finding is not surprising, but it also underscores a key learning that brands increasingly have gotten hip to over the last year. This may seem obvious but few adhere to it — if you can land a familiar face for your branded video, DO IT.” (via Mediapost)